Reflections Of An Internship
Written by Enoch Bernfield
Warm summer morning breaks crisp – darkness serves as an insult to my senses as I realize the inevitability of heat and humidity. To work I now go before imagined hotness charges into the shadowed coolness of my abode.
I bike down the gravel path to the gardens. I lift my head to breathe in the fresh air, and as I approach the cedar swamp, the impression of a change in temperature greets me; a shiver passes through my body.
I work weeding. As I push the wheel hoe through the paths, with a diminishing intention, the heat grows; I watch the sun rise over the hills to the East, and now I stare out at my mountains, and my perhaps-diminished intention is not so frail.
When I find myself pondering an entity, such as Sterling College is, I notice that – beyond the vicissitudes of graduation and matriculation – they are essentially systems. In simple terms, there are various levels of organization – administration, faculty, staff, student – that interact and work together to allow the school to function, and this can be intuited by anyone who has participated in an educational institution before; more broadly, a school is inestimable in its complexity and breadth, for it has a distinct culture that cannot be defined in a moment or understood upon first observation.
In work here at Sterling I saw that simplicity. As I labored in the garden that morning, it came to me: this group of people, here, work together immaculately. That was it – the revelation; something sweet on the tongue that I had ignored. Despite all of the frustration of a summer – seldom moving from this plateau, hard work, ten souls and I – I had a command of this place that humbled me.
Third year student, Sarah, led the CSA. Her love of people and food made her the perfect fit for the job; she adapted to the needs of our customers, created relationships with them, and communicated with the kitchen staff and farm. It would have been a difficult summer without a person as dedicated to the CSA as Sarah. First year student, David, has a scientific kind of mind. He is curious about methods, best practices, and whole system thinking. It was he who noticed the inefficiencies and complexities of this season, and pointed us in the right direction for future seasons as we define new weed management strategies. It was only together that the garden could run in all of its components.
Once a week I would draft a harvest list. Sarah would determine what needed to be used in the CSA and the rest would go to the kitchen. Together we planted about a third of the total acre plot with vegetables. Additionally, the Hoop House was planted with tomatoes, peppers, and sweet potatoes. On the rest of the field, David and I planted oats, peas, and vetch as well as buckwheat to serve as cover for the soil. Harvest was conducted every Tuesday and Wednesday in preparation for CSA pickup on Wednesday afternoon. Early in the season much of the work was seeding, transplanting, and prepping beds. As the summer progressed, more of our time was spent weeding and doing longer term tasks like mulching pathways. The farm ran with our equal parts toil and joy.
We were a house. Now here we had a door: she opened to people, hurried them in, and fed them. A reading room was full of texts that one could probe and study; there was the workshop, where order and creativity lay together with the toolbox and sawdust, that enabled a glorious flowering. And there was a foundation;– now that is where the breadth of this beast lies. When I imagine in my mind the whole lumbering giant of the Black River; and when I summon to the forefront of my brain the essence of that mighty creature whom some people lovingly term “Sterling College,” it is not the river with its long meandering course, nor is it the extended corpse of the mountains that pass into my eye – but faces. In this, the people I worked with are but an example of the breadth of this place. Yes, the mountains comfort me, but it is the people that make that comfort possible.
Faces come to my mind. I do revel in the hills, but I labor for the food that nourishes a community, and the community that in turn spirits my soul. If these humans, faces that I see as if in reflection, did not eat, how could they nourish the essential purpose of this noble experiment?
